Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran is a lecturer at the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India.

Roopa Madhav, currently a Research Fellow at IELRC, holds an LLM from New York University and a BA/LLB from National Law School of India University , Bangalore. She has been a visiting faculty at the National Law School, has worked with trade unions and was the President and Founder Member of the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. Her research interests include labour law, environmental law and human rights.

Kalpana Kannabiran is Professor of Sociology at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India and founder member of a women's collective, Asmita Resource Centre for Women where she coordinates research and legal outreach for women. She was Chair of RC32 (Women in Society) of the International Sociological Association from 2002-2006 and General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies in1998-2000. Her areas of specialisation are Sociology of Law, Jurisprudence and Gender Studies. She received the Rockefeller Humanist in Residence Fellowship at Hunter college, CUNY 1992-1993 and VKRV Rao Award for Social Science Research in the field Social Aspects of Law in 2003 from the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Institute of Social and Economic Change. A contributor to the Economic and Political Weekly and The Hindu, she has co-authored a volume of essays, De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power (Stree, Calcutta, 2002), co-edited Muvalur Ramamirthammal's Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2003), edited The Violence of Normal Times: Essays on Women's Lived Realities (Women Unlimited in association with Kali for Women, Delhi, 2005); co-edited The Situated Politics of Belonging (London: Sage, 2006). She is also a contributor to the Routledge International Encyclopaedia on Women and the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilisation, Volume IX Part 3 (New Delhi: Sage, 2005). Most recently, she has co-edited, Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Essays on Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights, Sage, New Delhi, forthcoming 2008. Kalpana was a Member of the Expert Group on the Equal Opportunities Commission, Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India in 2007-2008.

Pearson G 2003 'The pregnant preposition and the definite and indefinite article: Sections 82 and 87 of the TPA damages for the whole or the part of the loss', Competition and Consumer Law Journal, vol.11:2, pp. 163-186.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, is the President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Expertise:

Governance, Political Theory, Constitutional Law and Political Economy

Education:

B.A.(Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from Oxford University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Background:

He was previously Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University and Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard. He was also Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance, JNU. He has published widely in reputed national and international journals in a variety of fields including, political philosophy, intellectual history, constitutional law, international politics, society and politics in India. His most recent book are "The Burdens of Democracy" and "Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design". He has been a prolific contributor to public debates and his columns have regularly appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Indian Express, Telegraph, Yale Global, and numerous other papers. He has served as Editorial Consultant to the Indian Express. He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (forthcoming), and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals. He has lectured widely in universities in the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Europe and Japan.

Current Research:

Mehta's current research projects center around four themes. The first is understanding India's Great Transformation, the profound social, political and economic changes of the last two decades, and the trajectory they are likely to take in the future. This will result in a book. The second project looks at the role of law in Indian society. It will specifically focus on the justiciability of social and economic rights, and whether judicial intervention is a good means of achieving those objectives. This project will result in a series of papers. The third project - a collaborative project-related to the first two is on Globalization and the Indian State, that looks at the legitimacy challenges facing the Indian State in an era of globalization. The fourth project continues Mehta's long standing interest in philosophical ethics and explores what it means to lead an examined life. In addition Mehta will continue to perform the role of loyal opposition and engage the public and government through columns on topical issues.

Lavanya Rajamani is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. She is an international lawyer specializing in environment law and policy. She was previously University Lecturer in Environmental Law and Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Queens' College, Cambridge. She has a B.C.L and D.Phil. from Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and an LL.M from Yale.

Rajamani has authored a Monograph on Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (OUP, 2006) and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and the Journal of Environmental Law. In her current research she is exploring ways of further integrating developing countries into international environmental regimes, in particular the climate change regime, and studying national laws and policies in select developing countries (Brazil, China and India) implementing international climate change law. She is also writing a book provisionally titled International Environmental Law in Indian Courts: the Vanishing Line between Rhetoric and Law.

Rajamani has been invited to serve as Director of Studies for the 2008 research session on Implementation of International Environmental Law at the Hague Academy of International Law. She works as a consultant to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and has worked with the UNDP, the World Bank, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the International Institute of Sustainable Development. She is associated with the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, and serves on the editorial board of the Review of European Community and International Environmental Law.

Prabhu Mohapatra teaches history at the University of Delhi. His special interest is in Economic and Social History of Modern India, Migration and Diaspora history and Labour History . His current work centres around the long term pattern of Regulation of Labour relations and labour market in India. In which he explores the entrenchment and enforcement of Contractual relations in India specially in the Labour market and the workplace. Some of his published essays dealing with Law and labour relations are as follows.

1)( Forthcoming)" From Status to Contract: Or How Law shaped Labour Relations in Colonial India" in Jan Breman etal (ed) Debt Bondage in India

Alexander Fischer teaches public law and comparative constitutional law at the School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a Visiting Fellow (2004/2005) at the Centre for Law and Governance, JNU, New Delhi and taught at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg before shifting to London. Research interests: Constitutional and Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Federalism, Law and Courts, Law and Politics, Laws of South Asia

Siddharth Narrain is a legal researcher at The Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. His areas of interest include, sexuality rights, media laws and judicial decisions related to socio-economic rights in India. Mr Narrain has worked s a journalist for Frontline Magazine and The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi, writing extensively on socio-legal and human rights issues. He graduated from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Publications: Articles and Essays"Toward the Next Generation of Galanter-Influenced Scholars: The Reach of a Law-and-Society Founder." Law and Contemporary Problems (forthcoming 2008). With Stewart Macaulay.

"Scholarly Discourse and the Cementing of Norms: The Case of the Indian Supreme Court and a Plea for Research." 9 Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, (forthcoming 2008). Click here for full draft text on SSRN.

"Outsourcing and the Globalizing Legal Profession," 48 William and Mary Law Review 2189 (2007). Click here for a full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Analyzing the Friedman Thesis through a Legal Lens," 81Tulane Law Review 923 (2007). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Lawyering for a Cause and Experiences from Abroad,” 94 California Law Review 575 (2006). Click here for full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Transgressive Cause Lawyering in the Developing World: The Case of India,” in The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make: Structure and Agency in Legal Practice (eds., Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, Stanford University Press, 2005).

“From the ALI to the ILI: The Efforts to Export an American Legal Institution,” 38 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 1255 (2005). Click here for full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Professor Kingsfield Goes to Delhi: American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India,” 46 American Journal of Legal History 447 (2004). Full text on Westlaw. Click here for full draft text on SSRN.

"Bread for the Poor: Access to Justice and the Rights of the Needy in India,” 55 Hastings Law Journal 789 (2004). With Marc Galanter. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw. Full text on SSRN.

"India's Patriot Act: POTA and the Impact on Civil Liberties in the World’s Largest Democracy," 22 Law and Inequality 265 (2004). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Mobilizing Immigrants," 11 George Mason Law Review 695 (2003). Full text on Westlaw.

"The Rights of the New Untouchables: A Constitutional Analysis of HIV Jurisprudence in India" 25 Human Rights Quarterly 791 (2003). Full text on SSRN.

"Social Policy Advocacy and the Role of the Courts in India." 21 The American Asian Review 91 (2003). Full text on SSRN.

"Debased Informalism," in Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (eds. Thomas Heller & Erik Jensen, Stanford University Press, 2003). With Marc Galanter.

“So Help Me God: A Comparative Study of Religious Interest Group Litigation." 30 Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 233 (2002). With K. den Dulk. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Perceptions and Interpretations of Law from Past to Present in the Subcontinent." 34 George Washington International Law Review 639 (2002). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Public Interest Litigation in a Comparative Context." 20 Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal 19 (2001-2002). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Personal Law and Human Rights in India and Israel." 34 Israel Law Review 101 (2000). With M. Galanter. Full text on Lexis.

Education University of Michigan, Ph.D. August 1999, Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and HistoryAwards and Fellowships*NEH Fellowship [calendar year 2004]*Charter Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford University. *NEH Summer Stipend, June 1-July 31, 2001.*Postdoctoral Fellow, Sawyer Seminar “The Production of the Past: History in the Making,” Columbia University, September 1999-May 2000*Fellow, International Institute, University of Michigan, Advanced Study Seminar on “Violence and Ethics.” *Rackham Predoctoral Dissertation Grant, University of Michigan, 1997-1998*Rackham Dissertation/Thesis Grant and Hewlett International Dissertation Grant, University of Michigan, 1996 *American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship, January 1996- December 1996*Social Science Research Council/ACLS International Dissertation Award *Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (1992-1997)

Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism, for a series on Indian feminism, guest editor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003 (hardback). Paperback published Spring 2005 in India; co-published internationally by Zed Books, Summer 2005.

Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment: A Gender and History Reader. London: Blackwells, Summer 2005.

Journal Special IssuesCo-editor with Shani D’Cruze, “Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment,” a special issue of Gender and History, Volume 16, Number 3, November 2004.

Essays in Edited Volumes and Special Issues“Who is the Dalit? The Emergence of a New Political Subject,” in a festschrift in honor of Eleanor Zelliot, Oxford University Press (forthcoming winter 2007).

“Ambedkar and the Politics of Minority: A Reading,” in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, eds. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Mazumdar and Andrew Sartori, Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Dalit Selfhood and Problem of Representation,” Seminar special issue on “Dalit Perspectives,” February 2006.

“Sexuality, and the Family-Form,” in a symposium on Marriage, Sexuality, and Community, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XL, No. 8, February 19, 2005: 715-718.

“Testifying to Violence: Gujarat as a State of Exception?” in Elizabeth Castelli and Janet Jakobsen eds. Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. (New York: Palgrave and MacMillan, 2004.

Jinee Lokaneeta is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at DrewUniversity, Madison, New Jersey.Jinee's research is on Torture inContemporary Liberal Democracies focusing on the United States and India..Her areas of interest include Public Law, Jurisprudence, CivilLiberties, Political Theory (Postcolonial, Feminist and Marxist theory)and Cultural Studies.

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and of Law and Society at New York University. Her work explores the role of law in urban life in the US, in the colonizing process, and in contemporary transnationalism. She is currently doing a comparative, transnational study of human rights and gender. She was previously on the faculty of Wellesley College, where she was the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology. Her recent books are Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), which received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Local and the Global, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has authored or edited four other books: Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation (co-edited with Neal Milner, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (Temple University Press, 1981). She has recently published articles on women's human rights, violence against women, and the process of localizing human rights. She is past-president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and currently a member of the Executive Boards of the American Anthropological Association and the Law and Society Association.

Submitted PhD thesis to the University of Calcutta, July 2007 Topic: “Gendered Construction on Culture of Silence/Insignificant Articulation” Completed Masters in Sociology from CSSS, JNU in 2000Completed Graduation in Sociology from Presidency College, Kolkata in 1998

Academic Experiences• Presently working as Lecturer in Sociology at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata since December 2004. Offering LLB Optional courses on Disability and Law and Law, Culture and Pluralism besides co-teaching Sociology of Law and an LLM course on Law and Social Change • Visiting Faculty at the M Phil course on Women’s Studies in the Women’s Studies Research Centre at the University of Calcutta teaching a module on Feminist Methodology since July 2005. • Resource person at the Administrative Training Institute, Kolkata training government officials on various human rights related issues since 2007Papers Presented • Presented a paper on Laws relating to Sexual Harassment of Women in Workplaces at the JD Birla Institute, Department of Home Science and Commerce in a Seminar on Emerging issues to Empower Women in October, 2007• Presented a paper jointly with Prof Ved Kumari of the University of Delhi on Image of Family in Women’s Narratives and its interface with Family Law Curriculum at NUJS in August, 2007• Presented a paper on Silenced Voices in Women’s Autobiographies organized by the Women’s Studies Unit, JNU, Delhi in April, 2007• Presented a paper on Women and Partition Narratives: Experiences, Emotions and Expectations at a National Workshop on Women’s Histories, Women’s Narratives commemorating Lila Majumdar’s Birth Centenary, organized by Jadavpur University, School of Women’s Studies in March 2007• Presented a paper on Democracy and Gender in a national seminar on Democracy and Democratization organized by Jadavpur University, International Relations Department under the UGC-ASIHSS programme in March 2007• Presented a paper on Silenced Women, Talking Women: Women Narrating Conflict at the All India Women’s Studies (Eastern Region) Conference in February, 2007• Presented a paper on Integrating Sociology in Law School Curriculum: Discontent, Dilemma, Direction in a Workshop on Mapping Practices in Sociology and Thinking the Role of Social Sciences in India at JNU in January 2007• Presented a paper on Courtroom Dramas: Juxtaposition of ‘Objective’ Truths and Empathetic Listening? at the XXXIInd All India Conference of the Indian Sociological Society in Chennai, December 2006• Presented a paper on Women, Violence and Human Rights in a panel discussion on Status of Women in India at Gokhale Memorial College, Kolkata in December 2006• Presented a paper on Analysis of the Domestic Violence Act, 2006 in a panel discussion on Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act organized by Jadavpur University Women’s Studies Department in December 2006• Presented a paper Law’s Perception of Sexuality: Morality vs. Objectivity on the Closing Plenary of the IVth International Congress on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism held at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta In June 2006• Presented a paper at the annual International SHARP Conference on Women’s Personal Narratives: Creating Women’s History at Jadavpur University in January 2006• Presented a paper on Sociological Insight into Women’s Lives in the Private Sphere at the All India Women’s Conference Seminar on Personal Laws and Women’s Rights: The Indian Experience in January 2006• Presented a paper on Sociology in Law Schools: An Emerging Pedagogy at the All India Sociological Conference at Jaipur organized by the Rajasthan Sociological Association in December 2005. • Presented a paper on the Background and Existing Provisions of the Bengal Vagrancy Act, 1943 as a part of a Workshop on Bengal Vagrancy Act, 1943: Recommendations for Change organized by the Centre for Women and Law, The WB National University of Juridical Sciences and Action Aid International—India, in November 2005.• Given a Faculty Seminar at NUJS on Laws and Women’s Lives—an unbridgeable fissure? Bengali Women’s Autobiographies and Social Reform Legislations in the 19th century in August 2005.• Given a Faculty Seminar at NUJS on Sociology, Criminal Law and Social Order: An Interdisciplinary Perspective in January 2004.• Presented a paper entitled “A Sociological Approach to the legal principles dealing with Persons with Disabilities” at a Seminar on Socialisation of Women with Disabilities, organized by Calcutta University, Women’s Research Centre and Action Aid, India on 5th December 2003.• Presented a paper “Uniform Civil Code and Gender Just Laws” at a Seminar on “The Different Personal Laws in India” organized by State Commission for Women and National Commission for Women in association with National University of Juridical Sciences at NUJS on the 15th of March 2003.

Involved in a number of training programmes as resource person on issues related to women’s rights, rights of persons with disabilities and child rights

Active member of a women’s rights group in the city, Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum for Oppression against Women) and Maitri, a women’s network of NGOs and women activists in West Bengal

LASSnet

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance [Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi] initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law in different social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks, has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations with each other as well as enhance these conversations into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet, anchored at CSLG, seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years, collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia, especially, take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings.

We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

So far we have organised 3 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. We run a LASSnet Delhi Chapter which meets once in two months allowing researchers to present their ongoing work. We have also started a reading group, LASS Readings.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, and ideas.

CSLG also has a library that has put together important texts on law and social science scholarship. This network could use the archives at CSLG meaningfully as well as enhance it. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/